I had the huge honor of being interviewed on Mixergy and the interview went live today:

http://mixergy.com/ruben-gamez-bidsketch-interview/

I’m very excited about the interview because I’ve been a long time fan

P.S. Questions/comments/etc. on the Mixergy site appreciated.

The USPS has a weird system for mail carriers that want to transfer to another post office. Rural carriers can’t directly ask for a transfer, they must go out and find another carrier to trade offices with.

I mention this because my wife works for the post office and we were recently looking to move to Washington from Florida.

Finding someone to trade with is ridiculously difficult. People often spend years trying to find someone in the state they’re looking for.

We had spent months posting on forums and looking through transfer ads without making any progress. We were losing hope and getting desperate. I was racking my brain for a solution but couldn’t think of anything.

Luckily, around that time, the awesome Noah Kagan sent me an AppSumo video on Facebook advertising that blew me away. I immediately saw how with the insane targeting that Facebook allows, I could effectively reach rural carriers in other states.

How it works

First thing I did was create a landing page for each state that we wanted to move to. We wanted Washington and Oregon so I had two landing pages:

Washington – http://www.earthlingworks.com/washington.html

Oregon - http://www.earthlingworks.com/oregon.html

Note that I probably could’ve made it easier on the person by adding a Wufoo form in there but I thought that it might feel too impersonal so I gave out my email address instead.

Also, I know the beach images are kinda cheesy but I wanted to paint a picture of what living in south Florida could be like for them. Trust me, that sorta stuff helps

Anyways, after I created my landing pages I created my ad:

It’s just a very simple ad that speaks directly to the person viewing the ad. I made sure to include “WA” and “rural carrier” in the title because I knew that seeing an ad that can identify where you live and what you do is a powerful way to get someone’s attention.

I made sure to target the right people by choosing Washington as the location and USPS for work:

This is why Facebook advertising is awesome. Where else can you do this type of targeting? The estimated reach was only 850 people but when we’re targeting like this, that’s more than enough people.

I created another one just like this for Oregon and set my bid to 88 cents per click.

How effective was it?

Once my ads passed the approval process and went live, I started getting visits to the landing pages. I was only getting a handful of visits but this was the right type of traffic.

I ran the ads for about a month and got about 5 people to email me in that time. It just so happened that we ended up doing the transfer with someone from one of the forums, but I’m positive that one of those Facebook leads would’ve eventually worked for us.

It’s been a while since my last post where I talked about quitting my job so I figure I’m due for an update. Lots has happened since I quit my job and I’ve almost settled into a routine. Don’t really have a routine yet because of the big move to Washington state.

Moving…

Yep, I’m leaving south Florida for good to head over to Spokane, Washington. We closed on a house a month ago and some renovation work is taking place. I’ve been packing and getting everything in order in West Palm Beach, FL while my wife has been taking care of the new house stuff in Washington. It’s a busy time but I’m super excited about this move! Can’t wait

Being my own boss…

It’s been about three months since I stopped working for the man and with all the other stuff going on in my personal life I’m just starting to enjoy on my own. I actually took about a month and a half off so I’m just now getting into a routine.

I’m not a morning person so when I had a job I was always rushing in the morning because I was late. Totally the wrong way to start your mornings!

Nowadays I take my time and ease into the mornings. It’s great and I’m really enjoying the freedom. I work on Bidsketch related stuff about 3 or 4 hours a day (which includes 10 to 20 minutes of support). The rest of the time I’ve been spending packing or doing other chores. Needless to say I’m looking forward to settling into a different routine when I get to Washington.

Conferences…

I’ve been to LessConf, SuperConf and MicroConf in the last three months and had an awesome time at each of them. There’s so much to cover on the conference front that there’s no way I’ll be able to cover it all here; I’ll follow up in the next few days with more details. For now, I’ll just say that the thousand or so dollars that I spend going to these conferences is waaay worth it.

Revenue…

Bidsketch has been growing at a nice pace lately. In fact, I’ve almost doubled my revenue since I quit. It’s funny, I didn’t expect for it to earn this much when I first launched.

That said, I do have days where I feel like it’s not growing fast enough. Go figure. I just have to stop and remember to enjoy the journey when that happens.

Marketing….

Lots to cover on the marketing front. Too much for a summary so I’ll have to put out several posts about the sorts of things I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned these last few months. I’ve been digging into analytics and have tried a few interesting experiments so far. Nothing that has doubled my revenue by itself so far but there have been a few interesting moments.

I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time it seems. I had thought of all kinds of scenarios for how I might do it and what I might say but nothing prepared me for what actually happened today. I’m still in a bit of shock and I haven’t processed everything yet but it’s starting to sink in right about now.

Last night I was extremely anxious about having the talk with my boss. I kept trying to come up with the right words to say but couldn’t think of anything at all. As political as the environment has been at my job, my boss has always treated me with respect and she’s always been good to me so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. What actually happened was even tougher than I what I had imagined.

First, I came in to work and she wasn’t even there! Offsite meeting all day. Great.

A couple of hours later the other senior manager (I’m a senior manager) quit without warning or notice of any kind. Today of all days! He grabbed his stuff and told the project manager “I’m resigning. It will be a surprise to some people, but others should have expected it.”

Soon there was a rumor floating around that the other senior manager actually gave his notice and she was so furious that she told him to leave immediately. I have no clue if this is true but it certainly didn’t fill me with confidence at the thought of giving my notice a couple of hours later.

Anyways, my boss freaked out and cut her offsite meeting short. She came into the office and started running around and planning her next steps. Unfortunately for me her next steps included putting additional people under me.

She came into my office and closed the door. “I think Barry should be under you now. You know more about what he does and…etc.” I’m not 100% sure what she was saying at this point because I couldn’t believe what was happening. I snapped out of it long enough to realize that now was the time to tell her. So I did.

I told her, as gently as I could, that it probably wasn’t a good idea because I had decided to leave the company. I said that my business was doing well. Well enough to support my family and that I needed to focus on growing it even more. Her reaction? Well, I didn’t get thrown out  of the building which was great. She told me congratulations, and said that she knew that I would do great because I would be great at whatever I chose to do. She said that I had to do what was best for myself and my family and that she just wanted to see me be happy. Basically, she had nothing but nice things to say. Wow. I didn’t expect that but I was extremely glad it went in that direction.

It was a crazy day but in the end it all somehow worked out. My last day will be March 11. As I mentioned earlier, it still hasn’t 100% sunk in yet but I’m slowly getting there and I’m excited about what this means for my future.

I’m quitting my job. Yep, tomorrow is the day that I give notice at my day job. I’m blogging about it to have a written record of the whole thing because it’s such a major event for me.

I’ve worked at my job for a long time — just over nine years. I can’t say that I enjoy doing what I do anymore. I’m a manager of a great team, which is satisfying in many ways. But I’m a senior manager so I don’t even get that much time to run my own team anymore. Nope, my day is mostly about going to meetings and shielding them from a very political environment. Not fun.

So while I’m super excited about leaving the job, I’m anxious and maybe a little nervous. I’ve worked there for a long time and I like some of the people. My boss has always been good to me but she tends to be unpredictable with things like this so I’m really unsure how she’ll handle it. I’m certain it won’t be an easy conversation and I’m not looking forward to that part. Either way, it’ll be a major relief to finally give my notice and have my own projects and products to look forward to.

Wish me luck!

This is part two of a post on making 1k/month while working nights and weekends for a year. This is based off a Hacker News thread that was started a while back. My previous post mostly covered why many of the suggestions were so bad. This one will talk about what it takes to survive the abuse you’re sure to encounter during the first year of building, launching and enhancing your product while working full time.

Mentally, you’ll have to consistently find a way to stay motivated and avoid burnout. On the physical side of things, I can’t say I have a ton of advice to give. Like many entrepreneurs, my physical health suffered.

If you’re working day and night you’re simply not going to have a lot of time to exercise. You should at least try to make time for 20-30 mins of exercise on the weekends and a day or two during the week. Doing this will go a long way towards helping you fight a lot of the mental fatigue you’ll experience.

Staying motivated

One of the toughest things to do when working full time while launching a product is finding a way to keep yourself motivated.  It’s easy to be excited about a product idea when you first start out, but after a couple of months of working till 2-3 AM with little to show, you’ll find your motivation decreasing.

Some of the things I’ve found to help with motivation:

1. Don’t stick to a strict schedule. Creating a product by yourself means that you’ll probably be doing design work, coding, and marketing. If you’re not feeling up to writing code one night, switch gears and do some design work. If neither one of those sounds appealing then there’s always something to do on the marketing side of things even if you haven’t launched yet. This is one of the great things about what we do, there’s always something different to work on.
2. Just get started. Make a deal with yourself that if you get 10-15 mins of coding done tonight you’ll take it easy the rest of the night and watch a movie (or do whatever) afterward. I’ve done this many times and it’s amazing how tough it is to stop working once you’ve started.
3. Listen to music and audio interviews. Listen to music when working; listen to inspirational stories from Mixergy interviews while you’re driving, exercising, or doing chores. Just listen to Andrew Warner’s MailFinch interview or his interview with Ben Huh of Cheezburger Network and tell me that stuff doesn’t get you excited.
4. Realize you’re going to screw up. You’ll procrastinate, slack off, and miss deadlines. You know what? It’s ok. Just keep moving forward like it never happened. Be relentless; don’t let a bad day yesterday affect what you’re doing today. This is the most effective method I know for building (and keeping) momentum.
5. Work towards weekly goals. Create weekly goals and tell people about them. Find a friend who’s working on a product and have weekly calls where you keep each other accountable. If you miss your deadlines — which you’ll likely do from time to time — don’t beat yourself up about it, just keep moving forward.

Avoid Burnout

If you’re going to avoid burnout you’ll have to take short breaks (like weekend vacations) and keep things interesting. Working all the time is going to get to you after a while. Pay attention to how you’re feeling and take appropriate actions to keep things from getting out of hand.

Some of the things that can help avoid burnout:

1. Do some sort of physical activity away from the computer. For me it’s usually exercise. As I mentioned before, I don’t get to exercise all that often but it’s absolutely critical in helping me clear my head and spend some time away from the computer.
2. Treat yourself to some quality time with family and/or friends. Go to the movies and or out to a fancy dinner. Go out and interact with people that you like to be around. And when you’re doing these things make sure you leave work behind. I won’t lie, it’s easier said than done of course but it’s 100% necessary if you want this time away from your computer to be quality time. Rob Walling, author of Start Small Stay Small, says it best when he says: “Work hard and play hard, but never do both at once.”
3. Find a way to ship within the first six months (at most). Trim away all features that are truly unnecessary and make sure you ship something worth paying for within six months. With lean startups being so popular lately, I probably don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining why it’s a good thing to ship early and gather feedback as soon as possible, but I’ve seen this taken to an extreme. I’ve seen people ship products that were too simple. Products that no one wants to pay for because there’s nothing exciting about it. My advice is this: when shipping early add at least one interesting feature that’ll get people excited enough to actually use the damn thing. You can’t gather feedback if there’s nothing there to make people want to use it.
4. Outsource as much as you can. While you might be able to do every single tasks required to launch a product, you’re making things a lot more difficult than they need to be if you don’t take advantage of outsourcing. There’s something ridiculously awesome about seeing work get done while you’re busy working at the day job.
5. Build a support group. One of the most helpful things that I did early on was join a community of like-minded people. I was able to get advice, get feedback, and create friendships that helped me get through the tough times. I’m a bit of a loner so I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised at how much of an impact this had on me. Seriously. I’m convinced that it’s one of the main reasons why Bidsketch exists today. An embarrassing number of unfinished products from previous efforts that tells me this is the case. Bottom line: find people that are doing the same thing you’re doing and build your support group.

Do Them All

Maybe you can get away with doing just one or two of the things I mentioned. But why take the chance? Why not take advantage of every method of influence you have at your disposal? If you’re serious about launching something while working full time, you’ll stop screwing around and start stacking the odds in your favor.

A few days ago I came across a Hacker News post that asked the following:

Can I build something within that 1 year which starts giving me $1000 profit every month?

An important constraint here was that this was strictly a nights and weekends project because he has a full time job.

The answer of course is YES. There are plenty of examples of people doing just that and more. I’m happy to say that I’m one of the examples of someone that’s built a product in less than a year that brings in over 1k a month in profit.

The Hacker News crowd is full of a bunch of brilliant people that tends to have some great ideas and an interesting perspective on many of the articles posted there. That’s why I was stunned to see how horribly wrong so many of the answers were.

I’ll give some examples of the ones that I had a problem with and where they went wrong.

Example #1: Solve a problem that you are having. If you try to solve a problem that you’re not having yourself, you’ll likely fail.

This simply isn’t true. There are plenty of examples of this not being true — like me. I don’t do freelance web design and I’m currently not experiencing the pain of having to write and manage proposals using MS Word. This had nothing to do with how easy or difficult launching my product was.

What I do have is experience with the problem I’m solving. I used to freelance and I’ve experienced that pain before. Still, I would’ve done just as well launching my product if I didn’t know the first thing about this type of pain and relied on other people to fill in the gaps for me.

If you’re going to rely on someone else’s experience; I recommend you read up on it, observe others during said process, and talk to as many people as you can find about it.

Example #2: Copy a successful app.

This isn’t good enough. Facebook is successful, but copying would take you forever and then get you nowhere. What about something smaller? Basecamp is nice and slim but without the insane following that 37signals has you don’t stand much of a chance of hitting that 1k a month mark.

Hitting 1k a month is hard. Much harder than you would think. Simply copying something that’s making millions isn’t a shortcut to getting there.

If you’re going to copy something, copy the stuff that matters.

Wanna copy Facebook? Go niche with your social network and blow away any competition with a product that’s so well tailored to what those users want that anything else pales in comparison. Forrst comes to mind; it’s a social networking/code & design sharing app for designers.

Copy 37signals by building a big audience first. Take a controversial stand on all sorts of topics you truly find yourself going against the grain on, and build something where every ounce of it reflects your philosophy.

Example #3: Tackle a real problem companies face where the solution is relatively easy to implement.

I like the thinking regarding focusing on businesses but we’re still off the mark here. The problem with this statement isn’t even that the solution is easy to implement (though it’s something to be careful of). The problem is that  you don’t know if you have a market!

Not all solutions will put you in a market where you can earn 1k of monthly recurring profit. There are just way too many factors to consider.

1. How long are the sales cycles in that market?
2. What does the competition look like?
3. Will anyone pay for this solution?

There are plenty more but even taking these three questions into account could drastically change how viable you perceive your idea to be.

So how do you make +1k a month in under a year?

There isn’t a single answer to this question but there a few things that will drastically improve your chances of success.

Some of important things to think about: find a market, gather tons of feedback at every stage, start marketing before you write any code, build an email list, solve a real problem, and build something people like.

That still doesn’t solve the most interesting problem this person has in meeting their 1k goal:

How do you survive the mental and physical abuse you’ll get in a year’s worth of product building as a part time effort?

I won’t lie; It’s freaking hard. But it can be done. And my next post will show you how! Stay tuned…

Over the last few years I’ve heard entrepreneurs talk about how ideas are cheap, it’s the execution that matters.  You can even find things like this SAMBA blog post offering proof of how easy and worthless ideas are:

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

I don’t agree.

While there’s some truth there, it’s just not accurate. Ideas do make a difference. Sometimes they’re the difference between success and failure.

Great ideas can inspire action. They can keep you motivated and working your ass off past 2 AM. Try doing that with some lame idea. Good luck.

Now, this isn’t to say that if you have a great idea you’re guaranteed success. It just means you’ve got more fuel to light that entrepreneurial fire within when you need it most.

With the difficulty of launching a successful product, who doesn’t want every advantage they can get?